Originally Posted by
Kedsy
Yeah, what uh_no said.
On what else besides scoring can you ultimately judge defense? Even if you say "we played good defense, but they played great offense," doesn't that just mean our D wasn't good enough to stop them?
Except in the "classic" days, we didn't often let our opponents shoot an eFG% of 55%.
Clemson, NCSU, GaTech, Bellarmine, maybe Michigan State. Just because some of those games weren't close and none of those teams were as good as Virginia doesn't mean we didn't play better D.
This is true. Our first half adjusted dRating (0.98 ppp) was the equivalent of the #92 defense in the country. Our second half adjusted dRating (0.87 ppp) was the equivalent of the #1 defense in the country. But, as you allude, both halves count when you're talking about performance in a game.
Putting aside that I don't completely agree with the conclusions of that Pomeroy article, I do agree with your comment here. Duke did a great job keeping Virginia from shooting threes, especially Huff and Murphy. As I mentioned in my initial post in this thread, that one element was probably what won us the game. That said, just because we did one thing great on defense doesn't mean our defense was great.
If an opponent consistently hits a particular type of shot but we keep letting them take it, it's not good defense. If a team "just doesn't miss" over a length of time, it ceases to be "luck."
Yes. Maybe not "bad," but certainly mediocre.
I'll also say that my "eye test" said the same thing in the first half. Matthew was consistently out of position on defense, allowing Hauser to do whatever he wanted. Jaemyn missed several assignments and was generally not where he was supposed to be, at least when he wasn't letting people blow by him. Mark got caught in no-mans-land a few times. Jeremy and DJ were a little late with their switchbacks. We (especially Jaemyn) did play much better D in the second half, but that doesn't erase the poor defensive play in the first.
I agree. But there are four factors to defensive play. We did well in two of them (foul rate and turnovers) and not-so-well in the other two (opposing shooting and rebounding). To me, that says good but not great defense, not best D of the season.
The adjusted ratings attempt to take into account how good your opponent is, so we can at least try to compare apples-to-apples. Unadjusted, this was our 6th-worst opposing points per possession of the season. Because Virginia is so good at offense, it obviously wasn't our 6th-worst defensive performance. It wasn't our best, either.
Which is better D, if you hold a team that should score 80 to 75 or if you hold a team that should score 70 to 50 (assuming the same number of possessions in the game)? Even though the first opponent is a much stronger offensive team, I'd argue the second defense was much better.
Maybe. The way I look at it is our eyes can't see everything. I know what I think after watching the game and then I go to the stats to see if I was right or if my eyes deceived me. If the stats disagree with my eyes, I consider if there's a reason our play was better or worse than I thought. Unless I see a compelling reason, I trust the stats over my eyes. YMMV.
What I find insufferable is people who think they know best and won't brook any dissent, yet provide absolutely no evidence for their assertions.
Your eyes aren't the ultimate arbiter. Or do you think David Copperfield really made the Empire State Building disappear?